So here’s my idea: I would like to see a WordPress theme that allows readers to switch articles or advance to the next page of a multi-page article while reloading only the changed content, i.e. the article. I may be over-simplifying the issue since there may be cases where a different article or the next article page triggers other changed content on the page such as new ads. However, those are probably edge cases that can be dealt with after the main goal here. If you think the wait time isn’t such a big deal, perhaps this statistic will impress you: according to a Stanford report, for every 100ms of latency, Amazon discovered a 1% drop in revenue.

There are many ways to implement my idea. However, AngularJS is the method I would choose. This would involve creation of a WordPress theme with AngularJS at its core, connecting to a restful services that expose data in WordPress’s database as a JSON. It turns out there’s a plugin called Thermal that exposes WordPress data as a restful JSON services. Roy Sivan was thinking along these same lines and he already created an AngularJS WordPress theme that uses Thermal! He mainly did this as a development exercise for learning AngularJS so it doesn’t seem to have a lot of functionality yet. Still, I hope soon to dig deeper into what Roy has done and see if it can help solve the problem I’m trying to address. If not, perhaps I’ll roll up my sleeves and create my first WordPress theme.

Edit: I noticed that others have looked for a less obtrusive approach to solve the same problem using JQuery and pathjs. If I get a chance I may look into this approach as well.